The exhibition "Russian Orthodox Church during the Great Patriotic war" was opened at the Russian Science and Culture Center in Brest, BelTA has learned.

The exhibition presents the archival documents and photographs which used to belong to Patriarchs Sergius and Alexy I. Many documents have not been published before. This is the first time they have been made available to the general public as they were declassified just a few years ago. This makes the exhibition unique. It tells visitors about the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church during the war and its role in the international arena in the postwar years.

On Thursday, the 8th/20th of August, a delegation of ten officials of the Bulgarian Government and esteemed members of the Bulgarian society, performing humanitarian work under Mr Ragev Menasche from Israel, visited the Patriarchate.

New archaeological structures – including what is believed to have been a monastery dining room – have been unearthed in the renewed excavations of a 13th century monastery in Tarnovgrad, the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185-1396 AD), in today’s northern Bulgarian city of Veliko Tarnovo.

Fener Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I presided over a religious service on Sunday in a historical monastery in northwestern Turkey where only a few walls remain.

The patriarch was in Kirazlı monastery in Balıkesir province's Erdek district for the Divine Liturgy. The 99-room monastery was built in 1895 on the outskirts of a mountain and was abandoned in 1923, at the time of a population exchange after World War I that saw Turks in the Balkans migrating to Turkey while Greeks migrated to Greece.

The church of St. Athanasius in the southern Albanian town of Dhërmi was recently attacked and vandalized two days in a row reports the press office of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Albania.

On August 20th, during the festive period celebrating the Dormition of the Theotokos, municipality employees of Himara entered the church of St. Athanasius, removing icons and other sacred items and began to vandalize the building. The destruction took place without the knowledge of the Orthodox community or legal documentation, but carried the approval of local law enforcement.